Corporate Journalism: When Marketing and Media Collide

I spoke last night at a CMO Club dinner in Boston on the topic of Corporate Journalism. (Many thanks to Pete Krainik for the opportunity.) I’ve written about some of this before, but here’s the gist of what I talked about:

In early 2002, I was working at McKinsey in a newly formed internal communications group called Knowledge Services. The group formed to develop new methods to capture the intellectual capital the consultants were creating through their client work.

Our first task was cleaning up an internal document repository called PDNet, which contained more than 11,000 documents, most of them PowerPoint decks that were relevant only to the people who wrote them. The problem? The documents had no context, just a bunch of bullet points and factoids. Without the consultant to provide the story around the slides, their usefulness to anyone beyond the authors was limited.

Our group was asked to audit those documents, weed out the outdated, irrelevant and redundant ones, and add context to the rest.

For the latter task, we came up with a basic approach: get the authors on the phone, get them to talk through the slides, and ask them a few questions to fill in any holes. We then transcribed the conversations, edited them, and appended the text to the slides. Instant context. The documents were now much more valuable to new associates coming on board, or anyone else who needed to get up to speed quickly on a topic.

An interesting thing happened during these calls. The consultants we interviewed about documents they wrote 3 or 4 or 5 years ago would often respond, “I’m happy to talk to you about this document, but what we should really be talking about is the current work I’m doing with X client.” We had tapped into a vein of intellectual capital that hadn’t been mined – it was bouncing around inside the consultant’s heads or on their hard drives, and they hadn’t had time to develop it further to make it sharable.

This led us to create a new service line: creating articles and white papers that the consultants could share directly with clients or pitch to external publications. It was basically the same process as described above: We would interview the consultants, have them walk through whatever supporting PowerPoint deck they had cobbled together, ask a few clarifying questions, do some additional research, and deliver back to them a first draft of a paper.

The consultants loved it, because the process was easy for them – spend an hour on the phone with an editor, then review/revise two or three drafts until the paper was client-ready. It was a very efficient way to capture and share the firm’s learnings and enhance McKinsey’s already impressive thought leadership on key topics.

This was the beginning of what I and former colleague David Churbuck dubbed “corporate journalism.” We didn’t invent the phrase, but we glommed onto it as a way to explain to people how our approach was different from traditional mar-comm.

Corporate journalism is an effective method for uncovering hidden pockets of knowledge within your organization. It can be used to capture the expertise of your subject matter experts – from the CEO down to the front-line worker – and publish that information in ways that better position your company as a trusted resource in your market or industry.

There are three main benefits to this approach.

1. Influence – aka thought leadership. By tapping into the knowledge across your entire organization (not just from your executives), you can develop fresh insights about your company, your products, your customers, and the industry you serve. You can then package this information in a way that establishes you as an expert in your market space.

2. Credibility. The concept of corporate journalism also means unleashing journalists inside your company to ferret out the trouble spots. In this time of transparency and authenticity, corporate journalism means presenting the bad with the good. Otherwise people will just view it as more spin.

I’m not talking necessarily about taking all of this information public, but you’d be well served to uncover pockets of discontent among employees or customers before someone else blogs or tweets about it.

Being open and honest in your communications will build trust among your customers or prospects.

3. Reach. If you create content that is authentic and believable, and you openly share that content with your community, good things will happen:

Others will link to it.

They will comment on it.

They will share it with friends or colleagues.

As a result, your sphere of influence will expand. Your website will become a destination. You can actually host a conversation instead of (or in addition to) chasing it around the blogosphere.

You will give customers, prospects, or any other constituent a reason to come to your site, and a reason to return.

What makes for compelling content?

There’s no real rocket science here. It has to be:

Informative

Timely

Relevant

Accessible

For all of your target groups.

The accessibility piece is key, and often overlooked. It’s often hard to find useful information on a corporate website. That’s why more marketers need to treat their corporate site as a living, breathing media site – lead with your best/most timely content, offer user-oriented navigation, and make it all searchable, sharable, and ratable.

What kind of content can you create?

The good thing about capturing the insights of employees and executives across your company is that it can be packaged and distributed in many ways. In the early days of digital media we called it “skinning the pig” – how many ways can you package a single source of content? For example, from one on-camera interview with a subject matter expert, you can create a video or podcast that can be published on your site. You can also use the transcripts as the basis for:

Q&A’s

White papers

Website copy

Articles for external placement

You can then promote and link to those assets via:

Blog posts

Twitter tweets

Facebook groups

Social networks specific to your industry

That’s a pretty broad set of assets from a single source of content. And it’s a much better approach than sending out press releases and hoping that someone writes a story about you. (A quick aside – journalists generally don’t read press releases – and just because the search engines pick them up doesn’t mean anyone else reads them either.)

This combination of corporate journalism and social media can be a powerful platform for exchanging ideas and information, across your company (internally) and outside your organization and with partners, suppliers, customers.

Corporate Journalism in Practice

I just wrapped up an engagement with Manpower, the global employment services agency. Their corporate website is about as pedestrian as it gets – lots of traditional marketing copy, some press releases, a few white papers or research reports. Nothing inherently current, and nothing remotely compelling to the thousands of temps and contract workers that the company places with clients.

Manpower’s business is fueled by corporate clients who hire Manpower to fill gaps in its workforce, either temporarily or full time; relationships with the individual workers are mostly transactional (give us your resume, we’ll match you with an employee). But the company decided it needed a better connection to these job candidates. Two years ago, it commissioned a new web property that would serve as a career management resource for professionals, specifically those in IT, engineering and finance – a key focus for future business growth.

I was brought in as part of a team of consultants with Truman Company to help Manpower develop the content strategy for the new site.

Our first step was to audit their existing content. We asked the marketing team for their content; they gave us white papers and press releases. They weren’t thinking about content the same way as we did – so we cast a wider net to gather any material that drove their business – executive presentations, the reference guides given to job candidates at local branches, sales support materials, and so on. They had a boatload of useful information about interviewing skills, resume preparation, local job markets, workplace diversity issues, etc., but they had never published most of this material anywhere electronically.

The next step was to re-cast this content and make it Web-ready and suitable for the target audience.

Next, we recruited a group of internal subject matter experts – career counselers, diversity experts, HR professionals – to blog for the new site.

We also filmed corporate executives on the topic of career management, and posted the videos on the site.

We also conducted formal and informal interviews with a broad range of internal stakeholders to identify the top-of-mind issues from their dealings with clients and job candidates – and turned those insights into articles or online discussion forum topics.

The site, called MyPath, is currently in public beta. There are still plenty of kinks to work out, but this site represents a HUGE cultural shift for Manpower. They are embracing the concept of engaging directly with a core target audience. They are attempting to shift their business model on the fly to serve them well into the future. And they’re doing it by embracing the fact that they’re now a media company that can create compelling content to engage directly with the people who use their services.

The last example comes from the public sector and is referenced here.

Any marketer can learn from these examples. There’s inherent value in talking with your constituents – be they internal employees or external customers or prospects – to find out what they really think about a topic, an issue, a brand, a strategy.

It’s not easy. It often requires a culture change – specifically, how introspective are you willing to be? How much of the onion are you willing to peel back to find out how people really feel about your company and its products or services? And how much of that knowledge are you willing to openly share with your constituents?

Corporate journalism is a great way to:

take the pulse of your target audience,

develop insights that can be packaged and served back to the community,

engage and build credibility with the customers and prospects who will help your business grow well into the future.

The good news: There’s no shortage of out-of-work (or soon to be unemployed) journalists who have the skills to assist any marketer heading down this path.

11 thoughts on “Corporate Journalism: When Marketing and Media Collide”

Kidding. This is good stuff, Rob, brought to life by the case study. I recall interviewing a CIO in the mid-90s who was doing similar activities (minus the social media layer) and calling it knowledge management.

Hello both Rob and Derek (having written for both of you in the past). Hope you’re both well.

The piece rings true to my experience. I remember once doing some corporate work for a company working on a project for a big telecom firm. The ultimate client wanted “hero” case studies. Not only did was I writing a number of them, but networking within the client to find pieces that would be worth pursuing in the first place. We were digging up info that the company largely didn’t even know it had.

Great piece, Rob – I couldn’t agree more. Marketing folks (and companies generally) need to think of themselves more like media organizations in terms of producing and publishing engaging content for their various stakeholders, and your approach and examples give excellent guidance for that.

I’d probably add even more of a social media slant to this. You talk about blogs, podcasts, videos, etc., but implicitly as additional channels for distribution. They are that, of course, but it’s the interaction that’s key. So perhaps the idea here is that marketing needs to be more like what journalism itself is trying to become, which is much more about initiating and supporting ongoing conversations with readers who themselves are adding greatly to those conversations.

What I really wonder with all this is if there is some sort of tipping point, where companies move from just adding corporate journalism to the marketing mix, which many are beginning to do now, to having this really become the center of all marketing. Some new social media-based companies are doing this, but they are still the rare exceptions.

What if you are capable of creating timely, relevant, illustrated and humorous content and can’t even get work outside of Home Depot?
No one writes, no one responds … I can’t even get arrested in this economy ;-)